A candid examination of right-wing policies and the Democrats who play along and the horrid liberal policies designed to assuage the moderates but end up irritating everyone. And other stuff. And now, Authorized and paid for, Soglin for Mayor,Scott Herrick Treasurer. Yeah.

Uppity Wisconsin - Progressive Webmasters

August 17, 2017

The removal of City owned monuments to confederate soldiers in Forest Hill Cemetery has minimal or no disruption to the cemetery itself. There is no disrespect to the dead with the removal of the plaque and stone.

The Civil War was an act of insurrection and treason and a defense of the deplorable practice of slavery. The monuments in question were connected to that action and we do not need them on City property.

Taking down monuments will not erase our shared history. The Confederacy’s legacy will be with us, whether we memorialize it in marble or not. I agree with other Mayors around the country also speaking out and taking action. We are acknowledging there is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it. In Madison, we join our brothers and sisters around the country to prove that we as a people are able to acknowledge, understand, reconcile, and most importantly, choose a better future for ourselves.

There should be no place in our country for bigotry, hatred, or violence against those who seek to unite our communities and our country. That is why I instructed Forest Hills Cemetery staff to remove a confederate’s rest commemorative memorial. There is a larger monument, which has not garnered as much attention, which will also be removed.

August 15, 2017

Now that Donald Trump has finally called out the KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists, virtually every responsible public official has made it clear where they stand on the events in Charlottesville. As of this morning, we have still not heard from Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.

January 20, 2017

The Wisconsin State Journal asked me to write a letter to the President. Here it is, with a few modifications:

Dear President Trump,

When you drain the swamp, rid our nation of a monstrous falsehood that undermines our success and stops us at every level of government from building a great economy.

The lie is prevalent in the states of Wisconsin and Kansas, in the counties of Florida and Wyoming and in our nation’s capital.

Cutting income taxes for corporations and wealthy individuals does not lead to private investment and the creation of jobs. Cutting those taxes makes the one percent wealthier and screws the rest of us.

Quality jobs with a living wage are created by public investment in bridges and roads, high-speed internet and public education, for only then does the private sector invest in new businesses. The history of this great nation since the civil war has been periods of construction of dams, railroads, highways, airports, communication systems, education for veterans and more. Each of these periods of public spending was followed by significant entrepreneurship and a more robust economy.

The past four decades Washington D.C. has been infested with lobbyists and politicians who took care of themselves, and left the nation to rot. You have a spectacular opportunity to rid the swamp of polluters, leeches, and snakes that poisoned the water, the air, and the earth.

Now is your opportunity to create a new climate, a climate of investment and compassion that looks over all of the earth and its creatures, nurtures and grows the economy taking care of future generations.

January 09, 2017

Either they got more and more interested or they became conscious of the need to look interested. I would expect people, here in Madison, Wisconsin, to be aware of the importance of not looking bored or uncaring when someone comes at you with talk of "inclusiveness" and the "com[ing] together" of "cultures and ethnicities.

There is good reason why the analysis of the Public Market includes a focus on diversity, inclusiveness, and equity.

Here are some of the inputs in the analysis:

As is usually the case following difficult economic periods, the recovery after the Great Recession was pretty good for middle and upper income households including most professionals. It was bad, and is still challenging, for low income families and individuals.

The kind of entry-level jobs that used to provide parents opportunities to raise middle class bound children are quickly disappearing:

Full-time retail positions with advancement and career opportunities are replaced with part-time jobs with no benefits.

Entry-level positions in state government and at the University of Wisconsin are disappearing.

Wisconsin is dead last in entrepreneurship among the fifty states.

Madison is the major exception in the Badger State in creating new small businesses.

Entrepreneurship as an essential element of our economy is new to Madison because of our historic reliance on the University of Wisconsin and the Wisconsin State government as a job creator.

For low-income people of all colors and races, entrepreneurship is one of the few opportunities for accumulating wealth without a college degree.

The food industry is a robust sector for new businesses; over one-third of all new businesses in the US are founded by immigrants.

There are dozens pf public markets in the United States and they are as varied as their cities. The French Market in Chicago is expensive. It serves mostly highly processed foods to tourists and business people out for lunch.

Pike's Place Market in Seattle still provides a variety of fresh seafood to the locals, but it is expensive and losing its charm as it is now a major tourist destination. One only hopes it does not go the way of San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf.

The Reading Market in Philadelphia is in a class of its own. Its variety of foods, fresh and processed, and its history are unique, as is its relationship to the rail terminal. When Madison was to have a rail connection to Milwaukee in the pre-Walker era, locating Madison's Public Market in direct proximity to the Madison terminal made sense.

In Minneapolis and York, Pennsylvania, are three different markets for Madison to emulate. The Mercado is Mexican and the Global Market is what its name implies. In York, the market vendors are almost all white, reflecting the population of the community. All three markets, particularity the Mercado and York, are in unassuming buildings, their focus is serving real people, not elites and cosmopolitans.

If Althouse can look beyond her own exclusive world, one reeking in privilege, perhaps she will escape the shackles of her rigid assumption that everything in Madison is crafted by liberals, reeking in socialism. At times these plans are crafted by liberals reeking in capitalism.

I am not so sure it is a new theory for those of us in the Badger State, but it does make sense:

That feeling is primarily composed of three things. First, people felt that they were not getting their fair share of decision-making power... Second, people would complain that they weren’t getting their fair share of stuff, that they weren’t getting their fair share of public resources. That often came up in perceptions of taxation...And third, people felt that they weren’t getting respect.

Also the work of a sociologist who left a progressive university city (Berkeley CA, not Madison in this case), Arlie Hochschild went to Lake Charles, Louisiana. Read her book and learn why people toiling in the worst poisonous petro-contaminated conditions disdain the EPA.

...the political scientist Samuel Huntington published his final book, “Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity.” He used the term “cosmopolitan élites” to describe Americans who are at home in the fluid world of transnational corporations, dual citizenship, blended identities, and multicultural education. Such people dominate our universities, tech companies, publishers, nonprofits, entertainment studios, and news media. They congregate in cities and on the coasts. Lately, they have become particularly obsessed with the food they eat. The locavore movement, whatever its benefits to health and agriculture, is an inward-looking form of activism. When you visit a farm-to-table restaurant and order the wild-nettle sformato for thirty dollars, the line between social consciousness and self-gratification disappears. Buying synthetic-nitrate-free lunch meat at Whole Foods is also a way to isolate yourself from contamination by the packaged food sold at Kmart and from the overweight, downwardly mobile people who shop there. The people who buy food at Kmart know it.

Snarky footnote from me:

That's why I threw out the 2009 plan for a Madison public market that focused on expensive prepared foods for tourists, and insisted on one that sold vegetables with dirt on them, like carrots, beets, and tomatoes. Yes, there will be prepared foods, quality, prepared and wholesome foods, but the merchants and the shoppers served will be less than cosmopolitan elites.

December 27, 2016

With the forced resignation of Wisconsin Secretary of Transportation Mark Gottlieb, any scant hope for state roads and highways was washed away yesterday. When Gottlieb spoke honestly and frankly about the need to repair and improve the state network of roads and highways, calling for an honest commitment to safety, many of us were surprised. Such candor and honesty coming from a member of Governor Walker's cabinet was not expected. As reported earlier this month in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

There are 12,000 miles of Interstate, state and U.S. highways in Wisconsin and by 2027 42% of them will be in poor condition if the state doesn't find new revenue or other solutions, state Transportation Secretary Mark Gottlieb testified Tuesday.

In the coming years, the state is expected to end up using up to a quarter of every dollar in its road fund for debt payments under Gov. Scott Walker's two-year plan to borrow a half billion dollars for highway and bridge projects, Gottlieb said in more than three hours of painstaking testimony.

Whether it is getting milk to market or serving commuters, the state is in jeopardy. The economy of Wisconsin is headed in reverse.

It was shocking when Gottlieb spoke up. That he is gone shocks no one.

...but the mayor also made some good points while delivering a clever zinger most of his constituents will love. The only thing communist about Madison, Soglin told the Associated Press, is that revenue generated here is redistributed to help economically struggling communities in Duffy’s 7th Congressional District in northern Wisconsin.

The editors went on:

Wisconsin has long struggled with an urban-rural divide...We all should be on the same side in Wisconsin when it comes to helping each other succeed across regions of the state. When southern Wisconsin does well, that’s good for northern Wisconsin, and vice versa...

And that is where the conversation goes from here. We need a deliberate discussion to make sure the closing of Wisconsin public schools come to an end, which will only happen when the failed economic policies of Duffy, Governor Scott Walker, and the Republican State Senate come to an end. From WISC-TV, Channel 3:

"I fear for the future of our local communities as they look toward the loss of local schools, creating falling property values, creating terrible busing situations for our youngest students, and having families with young students deciding not to move into our area,” a speaker at the meeting said Thursday night.

District officials said the closures will make up for about $950,000 worth of the $1.5 million deficit projected through the next two school years.

Mayor Soglin was less interested in an apology. “I couldn’t care less,” he said. “It’s just a sad state of affairs that such ignorance is sitting in Washington, representing a fine part of the state of Wisconsin."

Meantime, while no one asked me for an apology, I did note that 'charlatan' and 'liar' were more appropriate, and that:

BUT LET ME STAY for a moment with the uncanny depth of what journalism failed to grasp about Donald Trump, for it also goes to a systemic incapacity. Tony Schwartz, Trump’s onetime ghostwriter, told Jane Mayer: “More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true. (my extra emphasis added)

Fact checkers be damned. They are irrelevant, of no consequence, and downright irritating at times.

Remember those 1100 Carrier jobs that Trump saved? It seems the numbers are not quite accurate, as the union president responded: Trump Lied His Ass Off:

Trump last week claimed he talked Carrier into keeping 1,100 jobs in Indianapolis, but that number turned out to actually be 800 because Trump and Carrier counted 300 jobs not initially at risk of being shipped overseas.

Trump offered the furnace and air conditioning manufacturer financial incentives to save from jobs being shipped to Mexico, a move that would have saved Carrier about $65 million a year.

The Truth is Dead, long live the Truth.

Note: This post is Part 1, since we know there will be repeated obituaries for the Truth.

Trump has proposed reducing the rate companies would pay to bring the money home from 35 to 10 percent. Those companies then could invest slightly more money in infrastructure projects, gain the 82 percent tax credit and effectively erase that 10 percent tax.

“We believe that this tax credit-assisted program could help finance up to a trillion dollars’ worth of projects over a ten-year period,” the Trump campaign said in an Oct. 27 white paper. The Trump transition team did not respond this week when asked whether his thinking had evolved since Election Day.

None of the longtime transportation analysts interviewed for this report shared Trump’s confidence that tax credits to private business would generate $1 trillion for infrastructure projects.

His immediate agenda is to get a massive infrastructure bill through Congress, along with big tax cuts. There are few barriers in his way. He can rely on Republicans to deliver the tax cuts and Democrats to support the infrastructure projects. The short-term boost this stimulus gives the economy can then be used to buy him time while he fails to get to grips with his other campaign pledges, on immigration, on manufacturing jobs, on taking the fight to the terrorists, and on sharing the love at home. He may even be able to claim for a while that by offering something to each side of the partisan divide he is starting to bridge it. But all he will be doing is papering over the gaping cracks. Tax cuts coupled with unfunded government spending will fuel inflation and create the conditions for a future crash. It will also lead to a head-on collision with the Federal Reserve and Trump won’t find it so easy to get his way there. If he tries to replace Janet Yellen or stuff the board with his own nominees, partisanship will reassert itself with a vengeance. Reality will bite back at Trump eventually. When it does, he will be inclined to lash out. But by then it may be too late.

“When government steps in arbitrarily with individual subsidies, favoring one business over others, it sets inconsistent, unfair, illogical precedent,” she asserted.

And in an apparent jab at Trump, whom she famously endorsed in a rambling speech earlier this year, she asked: “Republicans oppose this, remember? Instead, we support competition on a level playing field, remember? Because we know special interest crony capitalism is one big fail."

December 02, 2016

Candidate Trump threatened Carrier with tariffs if it moved jobs out of the United States. Now Carrier will keep most of the jobs in Indiana after President-elect Trump, declawed and de-fanged, wheeled and dealed with Carrier and gave them major tax breaks to stay put.

November 28, 2016

...WWC women voted for Trump over Clinton by a whopping 28-point margin — 62% to 34%. If they’d split 50-50, she would have won.

Class trumps gender, and it’s driving American politics. Policy makers of both parties — but particularly Democrats if they are to regain their majorities — need to remember five major points...

...If we don’t take steps to bridge the class culture gap, when Trump proves unable to bring steel back to Youngstown, Ohio, the consequences could turn dangerous (emphasis mine).

In 2010, while on a book tour for Reshaping the Work-Family Debate, I gave a talk about all of this at the Harvard Kennedy School. The woman who ran the speaker series, a major Democratic operative, liked my talk. “You are saying exactly what the Democrats need to hear,” she mused, “and they’ll never listen.” I hope now they will.

It is clear that the U.S. has trade and diplomatic relations with a myriad of dictatorships around the world. Curiously the one that is among the best in terms of elevating the levels of education and health care is the one we choose to embargo.

The lie is that the barrier to relations between the United States and Cuba is the Cuban Communist dictatorship that ruled the island nation since Fidel Castro took power in 1959. There are three elements to a dictatorship that are often cited as the reason for our embargo of Cuba.

Listed below, they are followed by examples of nations the U.S. recognizes:

No democratic free and open elections: China, Ethiopia, and Azerbaijan

Political prisoners: Central African Republic, Russia, Qatar

No free press: Saudi Arabia, Cameroon, Myanmar

A VERY SHORT HISTORY OF US-CUBAN RELATIONS

After Spain was driven from Cuba in 1898, the U.S. took control of the island for intermittent intervals through the 1920's.

In the 1930's Fulgencio Batista consolidated power until Castro sent him packing in 1959. By time Batista took control most land in Cuba was owned by U.S. companies. Sugar, telephone (IT&T) and other industries were controlled either by the United States or Cubans who assisted in the expropriation of Cuban land.

Poor peasants were resigned to toiling for the conglomerates and monopolies rather than working the land that once belonged to them.

When Castro took control he nationalized these businesses, taking real estate and buildings now valued in the billions of dollars. The fight is over the compensation for the seized assets that belonged to American citizens; the fight is not about the seized assets of former (like Ted Cruz's parents) or current Cuban nationals or democracy in Cuba. The Cubans are prepared to pay. The question is 'how much?' The Cubans have counterclaims: losses suffered in the Bay of Pigs invasion, losses resulting from a hijacked airplane and the subsequent loss of life, these are claims for injuries and loss of life caused by U.S. hostilities. The second collection of Cuban claims are based on the illegality of the embargo and the damage to the Cuban economy.

Among those who lost property were Batista and his Cuban thugs, U.S. companies who established a foothold through bribery and theft, and legitimate Cuban families that came about their wealth honestly, and an assorted collections of mobsters:

...Already, a Tampa resident, Gary Rapoport, has publicly inquired about compensation for the Riviera, a 352-room waterfront hotel in Havana that was inaugurated in 1957 by Ginger Rogers. It was owned by Mr. Rapoport’s grandfather Meyer Lansky, the organized-crime figure.

In an interview with The Tampa Tribune, the mobster’s grandson put it like this: “Cuba owes my family money.”

November 25, 2016

The argument is that the United States should do away with the Electoral College and award the Presidency to the winner of the popular vote. The argument suggests that it fairly puts every state in play. Yes, but to conclude that Hillary Clinton would be the next U.S. President is an incredible leap of faith.

The conduct of both candidates and their strategies would change with every state in play.

The key to understanding this is the success of the Trump campaign in incrementally improving his vote (compared to Republican candidate Romney in 2012) in the battleground states, and more importantly, suppressing the Clinton Democratic vote compared to Obama of 2012.

Divide the states into four categories:

Democratic states -New York, California, Massachusetts, Oregon, etc.

Republican states - Mississippi, Kansas, Texas, Idaho

Swing states Clinton needed for a big win, mostly southern states -, North Carolina, Florida

When we compare the votes both in terms of years (2012 and 2016) and how they split (Democrat and Republican) it becomes clear that wherever Trump campaigned, he marginally improved over Romney and significantly suppressed the Democratic vote, resulting in a much weaker performance for Clinton compared to Obama in 2012.

What this means is this: if the candidates had to appear with regularity from coast to coast, Trump, not Clinton, would have done better in the popular vote. Clinton's large pluralities in California and New York would have been suppressed as they were in North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida, and to a larger degree in Wisconsin and Michigan.

Clinton vote in bold

Wisconsin

New York

2012

2016

2012

2016

Republican

1.41m

1.41m

Republican

2.49m

2.64m

Democrat

1.62m

1.38m

Democrat

4.49m

4.15m

Michigan

Pennsylvania

Republican

2.12m

2.28m

Republican

2.68m

2.90m

Democrat

2.56m

2.27m

Democrat

2.99m

2.84m

California

Florida

Republican

4.8m

4.20m

Republican

4.16m

4.62m

Democrat

7.85m

8.02m

Democrat

4.24m

4.50m

Takeaways:

Wisconsin: Trump campaigned modestly and matched the Romney vote. The Clinton vote failed from the combination of her absence and the strong Trump suppression effort. Clinton does her best in areas where Bernie Sanders prevailed in the primary.

California: Neither candidate campaigns, Clinton avoids Trump suppression effort and adds 167,000 votes to Obama totals; in the meantime Trump lags behind Romney by 630,000 votes. The point being, a competitive race in California would have significantly cut into the Clinton popular vote and increased the Trump vote.

New York: both candidates were well known and given the 'local' news coverage, played a little but more like a swing state. Democratic (Clinton) vote deceases over 2012, Republican (Trump) increases.

In most states where the vote total increased over 2012, Trump won. In states that Clinton won and the vote total increased, it was modest.

Bottom Line:

An election based on winning the popular vote provides a very different campaign and a very different popular vote. In 2016, the more the candidates campaign, the closer the popular vote by driving down the Clinton vote significantly and modestly increasing the Trump vote.

It appears where the Clinton vote was not suppressed, it was impacted by the presence of a stronger Democratic U.S. Senate race.

Bonus answer: Clinton focuses on Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, and ignores Florida and North Carolina she probably wins the popular vote AND the electoral college.

Double bonus answer:

Being a candidate who relates to working Americans of all races and genders also helps the Democrat.